Paul Skenes’ Topps Rookie MLB Debut Patch Card Sells For $1.11M At Auction
Update, March 21, 6:20 p.m.: The story has been updated to add that Dick’s Sporting Goods say that they were the winning auction bidder and will be displaying the card at one of their Pittsburgh locations.
It’s official: Paul Skenes’ Rookie Debut Patch card from 2024 Topps Chrome Update is a million-dollar card.
$1,110,000, to be exact.
The lucky buyer won with what was the 64th bid on the 14-day auction, which closed at shortly before 1 a.m. early Friday morning.
On Friday afternoon, Dick’s Sporting Goods announced that they had been the ones to place the winning bid, and that they planned to display the card at their Ross Park location in Pittsburgh (Dick’s headquarters is also in Pittsburgh).
The $1.11 million total includes the $925,000 “hammer price” and an extra $185,000 representing the added 20% Fanatics Collect auction fee.
Because of how Fanatics Collect’s payout structure works, the seller of any card whose “hammer price” is between $250,000 and $999,999 receives a bonus 12.5% of that hammer price (taken out of the Fanatics Collect auction fee), as well. Assuming that holds true for this auction, the lucky 11-year-old in Los Angeles who pulled the card from a hobby box on Christmas Day would receive $1,040,625 from the sale, and Fanatics Collect would receive the remaining $69,375, which they have said they will donate to help wildfire victims in the L.A. area.
(Fanatics Collect is a sister company of Topps.)
The 1/1 Skenes patch was the chase in the 2024 Topps Chrome Update release when it came out on Nov. 13. The card was pulled on Christmas Day, though the find was not made public until weeks later. The collector and his family chose to sell the card—which was graded a Gem Mint 10 by PSA at the Fanatics Collect auction— rather than take one of multiple other offers, including the massive one offered by the Pirates which included 30 years of season tickets, a meet-and-greet with Skenes himself and many other goodies.
The Pirates have said they will still arrange a meet-and-greet between Skenes and the lucky collector when the Pirates are in Los Angeles this season.
The $1.1 million the card went for makes it the priciest Topps Debut patch sold in the two years since the program was introduced. As it was, the No. 2 was also crowned last night, as the Jackson Holliday debut patch sold for $198,000 in the same auction.
Since Fanatics Collect launched last July, its highest-selling card to date is a 1933 Goudey Babe Ruth card (graded a PSA 8.5), which sold for just over $1.6 million this past November.
Topps introduced the Rookie Debut Patch program in 2023, including the 1/1 autographed mementos in their Chrome Update product, which comes out about a month after the season ends.
Anthony Volpe’s patch was the big hunt in 2023, and earned its lucky collector a $150,000 bounty from retailer Dave & Adam’s. The patch program exploded last fall, with patches for Skenes, Holliday, Jackson Chourio, Jackson Merrill, Elly De La Cruz, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and more.
So far, just over 200 of the 251 patches have surfaced publicly. Among the patches unaccounted for are those of Merrill, Yamamoto and Evan Carter.
The 2025 Topps Chrome Update release later this fall will include players who made their debuts in late 2024 and early 2025, including Dylan Crews and James Wood. Just this past Tuesday, Matt Shaw made his Cubs debut on Opening Day wearing a patch. The hot chase this year is expected to be the patch worn by Roki Sasaki when he made his MLB debut on Wednesday.
Editor’s note: The author of the story owns a Debut Patch that is also part of a Fanatics Collect auction this moth, albeit in a weekly auction rather than the Premier auction.
